


The Arms of Grace

by melliyna



Category: Criminal Minds, The West Wing
Genre: Crossover, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 14:08:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melliyna/pseuds/melliyna





	The Arms of Grace

  
  
  
**Entry tags:** |   
[fandom: criminal minds](http://melliyna.livejournal.com/tag/fandom:+criminal+minds), [fandom: west wing](http://melliyna.livejournal.com/tag/fandom:+west+wing), [fic](http://melliyna.livejournal.com/tag/fic), [rating:pg-13](http://melliyna.livejournal.com/tag/rating:pg-13)  
  
---|---  
  
_**Fic: The Arms of Grace: PG-13**_  
**Title:** The Arms of Grace  
**Author:** [](http://melliyna.livejournal.com/profile)[**melliyna**](http://melliyna.livejournal.com/)  
**Fandom:** Criminal Minds/West Wing  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Word Count:** 1,400  
**Disclaimer:** These characters are not my creation, I merely borrow and make no money from such borrowing.  
**Warnings/Timeline/Spoilers:** Time-line has been fiddled with a bit, liberties taken with back-story but basically there are spoilers up to S4 of the West Wing and S3 of Criminal Minds (which is what I've seen up to)  
**A/N:** For the 'albums' prompt at [](http://community.livejournal.com/tww_minis/profile)[**tww_minis**](http://community.livejournal.com/tww_minis/) from the album _No Name Face_ by Lifehouse. Title and lyric quotes from 'Breathing' (by Lifehouse, the first song on the album), the light on the hill reference from Australian Prime Minister Ben Chifley's 1949 speech. This album lends itself to politics, grace and hope and I hope my story can do it justice (if you'd like the song, let me know and I will upload).

_I'm finding my way back to sanity again  
Though I don't really know what  
I'm gonna do when I get there  
And take a breath and hold on tight  
Spin around one more time  
And gracefully fall back to the arms of grace_

 

"Aaron, don't you have a life to get round to somewhere that isn't inside a classroom." It catches attention, across an emptying classroom and Toby looks up, as he packs up his briefcase. It becomes a refrain, about life and the interludes and meanings that seem to be untangled only in retrospect.

The man, turns to his friend with an easy look of reserve that belongs to an elder wisdom. But he is young, Toby qualifies, though in certain lights you wouldn't think it - later on he will look at Sam and be reminded of them, one and the other. Dark, handsome and full of the light on the hill, the kind of light that would get speeches made. He's watchable, across the quad, in the classroom, because he has a self containment, but it's not disdain or distance that remains an underlying impression. People tend to see the decency in Aaron Hotchner, after a very short amount of time.

Hotch was nineteen when he met Toby and wasn't yet Hotch. He's still wary, but he's in awe of Professor Ziegler, if not enough to not venture an opinion in class. What he's learning, this young man, Toby decides is that by inches and bounds he is becoming the man who can have his own opinions, not simply those he has tailored to be diplomatic, tactful. It's not toadying, it's something like survival. Toby doesn't ask, because Aaron never volunteered and truth be told, Aaron is another undergraduate. Aaron, who is handsome without the kind of glaring, too bright teeth that most people would be drawn too, but he draws looks and then draws them away before they get beyond the surface.

-

The first year, Toby doesn't see him without a jacket or long sleeves and he looks adult like, all shirt and jackets and books. He's a psychology major, but with aspirations towards pre-law. He takes notes carefully in a nicely spaced hand, has a good hold on his pen. And he doesn't say much, in the back and forth of classes and political opinion but when he does, it's always considered. Aaron Hotchner, essentially, is a good and decent young man but Toby wonders, about all kinds of things. About the absence of a glimpse of bare arms, of the curves, shapes, lines and angles of those arms, as he watches that decent young man who is not so young pack his backpack back up. His friend follows after him, eventually but looks at his retreating back a moment and Toby wonders, does this Aaron know and decides he must not. He does not seem the kind of man who is aware that others would notice him as handsome.

-

He watches, in the course of the class as debates ebb and flow. You get a lot of different flavors of opinion and reticence - Aaron is a student that leans - another study in angles against his chair. When he speaks, sometimes you can hear the faint traces of a Virginia accent, old Virginia money. There's a boy who was raised in red brick, white columns, civil war trails and the strange contrast between heat and snow that is the turning of the seasons here and as the class files out, Toby hears half a conversation of Charlottesville remembrances - diners, five guys and time spent hiking in the foothills of Blue Ridge.

Though he never speaks much of home in terms of parents at all. Aaron Hotchner is a character study in living lines, to written upon, to be imagined in potential. He is very private, in one way or another but there is a feeling that Toby gets, that whatever Toby Ziegler may carry, this young man carries something else entirely, with his own kind of grace. In another person perhaps, it would have been an uncomfortable thing for him, but somehow for this undergraduate it is different, perhaps because he seems to bear it all unknowing of what it is that he holds.

And again, he will be reminded of Sam, in some ways. Though Aaron is not a writer by vocation or inclination - though he writes with a dry, wry gift that is all the more odd for the optimism and warmth that comes through.

But he is not a writer, but a psychologist, a good one, perhaps more than he is a lawyer. Or a leader, Toby amends later, after he has met Sam and Governor Bartlet. They both have a spark that makes good leaders and good people both. And he sees the look that is something like hero worship and wonders, sometimes, what it was about these bright eyed men that drew them to him and to see something to esteem. For Aaron Hotchner does.

-

 

The fourth year, Senior year, his student Aaron starts wearing t-shirts, showing arms that don't have even the faint hint of visible bruises. His friend still smiles at him, somewhere between exasperated and loving. His friend, the Creative Writing major, whose name and life Toby knows less of, in some ways than he does of the boy who is heading for law school. His friend, the better writer perhaps, with a passion for literature and for making good points about gendered readings of texts, social and political contexts and the fine art and structure of writing, but he does not have that spark fueled by empathy that Aaron does. That Aaron will always have, that Toby knows he has - in a different way.

You can't learn or train that kind of empathy through talent or technique. And Aaron is going to Law School, full of dreams and good with people. On the last day of classes before finals, he finds a letter and parcel pressed in to his hands as the room empties. - It's a book by an author Toby particularly likes, a thoughtful card and again, Toby wonders. About Aaron Hotchner and how he can care enough to give such gifts, but make sure no one has to go to the trouble of finding out about his own tastes, his own way of reading - whether he prefers hardback or paperback.

-

The book stays with Toby over time - through campaigns, through elections and meeting Sam and honing his own craft, academia left behind. Through the twins. The book remains, the card still tucked in and Toby still wonders, what became of the young man and what did he become and who else, did he find a measure of grace to bestow upon. And about the friend, who went on to become a novelist, who pens a familiar story in his works.


End file.
